National Post (National Edition)
TO THE NDP AND LIBERALS, THIS IS HARPER, PART II.
New Tory leader must harness this quality
From the Liberals’ and New Democrats’ perspective, it is remarkable how little strategic change the transition from Stephen Harper to Andrew Scheer will necessitate. Scheer, we will hear, is antiwoman, anti-gay, anti-transgender and anti-Muslim, and he is a climate change denier.
Scheer is Catholic, like Justin Trudeau, so they’ll have to ditch the part about the Evangelical theocratic conspiracy. But they won’t need it, because unlike Harper, Scheer has been relatively up-front about his beliefs. The new Tory leader describes his pro-life beliefs as a “core conviction.” He won’t voice personal support for same-sex marriage.
Stephen Harper left politics with a disapproving red light from the Campaign Life Coalition. He worked and voted tirelessly to keep abortion off Parliament’s agenda, the pro-life organization complains. By contrast, it lauds Scheer for his “impeccable voting record on life and family issues.”
Yet Scheer, like Harper, promises his government will keep same-sex marriage and abortion off its agenda. And in this respect, I think social conservatives might have made a tactical error in preferring the family man Scheer’s so-con bona fides to the rakish Maxime Bernier’s parliamentary libertarianism.
Last week, Huffington Post’s Althia Raj asked Scheer if he would be content to allow socially conservative MPs to pursue their causes through private member’s motions or bills. “It is the leader’s job to encourage people to bring up issues that unite us rather than divide us,” he responded, obliquely. He called the question “hypothetical.”
Bernier’s answer to the same question has been, essentially, “yes.”
That said, either Bernier, the non-social conservative who understands what Parliament is for, or Scheer, the proud but pragmatic social conservative, was a reasonable choice to follow Harper’s stifling, paranoid leadership. Both are much more cheerful, much more comfortable in their own skins, and show far more confidence in their party. In different ways, each proposed thinking of its social conservative wing as it should be thought of: not as a problem to be managed, but as a natural feature of any bigtent conservative party.
The opposition and the media consider so-con beliefs utterly anathema, if not unsuitable for debate, and that is their right. Many voters simply do not agree.
An Ipsos poll conducted in March found 53 per cent of Canadians thought abortion should be available whenever a woman chooses, but 24 per cent thought there should be restrictions. An Angus Reid poll last year found monolithic support (84 per cent) for extending human rights protections to transgender Canadians, but not inconsiderable opposition (33 per cent) to bathroom choice.
The same goes for other issues that populate antiConservative attack ads. In March, Angus Reid found only 12 per cent of Canadians felt the Liberals’ anti-Islamophobia motion was both “worth passing” and “will help reduce anti-Muslim attitudes and discrimination,” while 31 per cent opposed it outright. Last year, Université de Montréal researchers found 39 per cent disagreed that the planet “is getting warmer partly or mostly because of human activities;” 44 per cent opposed increased taxes on fuel.
The leader needn’t agree with or pander to any of this. He needs simply to tolerate its presence under the big tent, just as leaders of liberal parties all over the world tolerate the less-than-convenient inhabitants of their own tents: wi-fi phobics, Israelhaters, multiple sclerosis conspiracy theorists, wackadoo anti-Americans, Hedy Fry.
Harper wasn’t at all like that — out of necessity, some would argue, as the first leader of a partially reformed conservative coalition that had blown apart not long before. But far too often under his leadership, and certainly at election time, the Conservatives’ conservatism seemed too much like Kellie Leitch’s “valuesscreening” gambit: calculated to elicit reaction, rather than to convince or convert the skeptical. They evinced too little confidence in their own ideas, and they paid a big price for that.
Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s former communications director, recently warned that Bernier would have terrible trouble as leader thanks to his plan to slough off health care funding on the provinces. “There are some files for which a political party just isn’t trusted on motive,” he wrote at Maclean’s. “For Conservatives, health care is one of them.”
No doubt. Trouble is, the people who don’t trust Conservatives on health care also tend not to trust them on immigration, on criminal justice, on aboriginal affairs, on women’s rights, on foreign policy, and so on. And I doubt they ever will until the party leaders show the sort of confidence in their MPs, supporters and movement that was on display at the convention.
The many different kinds of conservatives in the Toronto Congress Centre over the weekend seemed perfectly happy to move forward in each other’s company. If Scheer wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, he will have to exude that same unapologetic confidence: he leads a party of real Canadians with a diversity of views and opinions that are just as worthy of inclusion in the national debate as any others’, and here’s what they have to offer.
THE PEOPLE WHO DON’T TRUST CONSERVATIVES ON HEALTH CARE ALSO TEND NOT TO TRUST THEM ON IMMIGRATION, ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE, ON ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS, ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS, ON FOREIGN POLICY, AND SO ON. — CHRIS SELLEY